Installing Windows 10 for Mi Notebook Air

Mi Notebook Air is fabulous in hardware. It is thin, elegant with rock solid built quality. And the price at US$530, with 12.5″ LCD screen, Intel Core M3 processor, 4GB RAM and 128 SSD hard drive. It is very attractive overall.

The drawback is the pre-installed Simplified Chinese Windows Operating System. Most people think you would need to buy a new Windows license to install the Windows 10 of your choice language. It is wrong. The Mi Notebook Air embedded with a digital Windows license. All you need to do is to install a new Windows. Once your notebook is connected online, its Windows license will be activated automatically. The following shows the steps to install a new Windows on a Mi Notebook Air.

To install a new Windows, you need to create a Windows 10 installation media. The easiest is to use a USB flash drive. The USB drive should have at least 8GB capacity, formatted in FAT32. Download & save the Microsoft Windows Media Creation Tool from Microsoft website: https://www.microsoft.com/en-hk/software-download/windows10

Prepare a 8GB USB drive, run the Media Creation Tool and follow the instructions to create the Windows 10 installation media of your preferred language.

After the USB drive is ready, reboot your notebook and press F2 on startup to enter the system BIOS setup. Navigate to the Boots section and change Boot Mode to Legacy, enable USB Boot, and change the boot order to boot from USB first. Save the settings and reboot the notebook.

After reboot, the notebook boots from the USB drive and starts the Windows installation. Follow the instructions to install a new Windows Operating System in the notebook. You can delete all existing hard disk partitions and create a new partition to install the new OS. Following the Windows instructions. The notebook should reboot a few times during installation. After the installation completes, remove the USB drive and restart the windows.

The notebook will boot into the new OS and the Windows activates automatically once you connect to the internet.

The Mi Notebook Air is a high quality notebook with rock bottom price tag. Although the pre-installed Windows 10 may not be your choice language, you can install a new Windows 10 with ease and no extra cost.